Florence (part II)

Now, in
fresco the moment of passion was prolonged even as the vibration of a string
which continues after the fingers have ceased to touch it, and recommences at a
new touch just when the vibration is about to die away. From her long Christian
education Florence had to liberate the desire that she felt within herself as
she beheld the statues that had been unearthed, as she read the ancient poets
and philosophers, as she lifted her wild eyes to the rim of the mountains. The
problem was to find the passage between the social ideal vainly sought by the
Italy of the Middle Ages and the intellectual ideal toward which the Renaissance
was tending. And that was the glory and the pain of the painting of the
Tuscans.

For
them this great century began with an indecision that lasted until the end. Of
the strong and healthy joy of Giotto, cradling in his great undulating line the
lofty certitudes on which all of mediaeval society lived, nothing much
remained. In the cloister, to be sure, away from the world, the belief in them
persisted, but it took on the appearance of an illusion voluntarily accepted.
The monk, Angelico, a vigorous builder, indeed, and who transmits to the great
classics—in addition to the deviations and the weaknesses of the last
primitives and the hesitations of the precursors of Raphael—the grand
structural logic of Giotto, the monk, Angelico, never dreamed that he was
celebrating Christianity somewhat as one illuminates a legend in the margin of
an old book. This legend softened him, without doubt, and even amused him. The
most terrible stories unrolled like a child's tale, and it was nearly always
the gentlest of them that he selected. As he believed in hell, and as hell
rumbled at the gates of his cloister, his inexhaustible imagination knew full
well how to mingle and oppose dramatic crowds, how to cloud the heavens with
arrows and lances, how to crush the feet and hands of the Saviour on the great
cross around which suppliant forms were prostrated. But he was far more
attracted by the visions of Paradise, with its lyres, violins and trumpets of
gold, by the angels winged with multicolored plumes in the pure striated
landscapes of black cypress trees. His was a charming nature, happy in loving,
happy in living, happy that there were flowers in the fields so that he might
spread them under the feet of the young saints. Even the blood of the martyrs
made white daisies grow in the reddened grass. He never failed to associate
with his enchantment the springtime and the summertime of the Florentine
countryside. He was too candid to perceive that he was enjoying painting for
its own sake and that he loved the mother of Jesus with a love so delightful
only because she had the exquisite countenance of a timid little virgin,
because she wore a beautiful dress all of white and had an aureole of gold. He
was not the first, certainly, to recount the Annunciation. The Sienese returned
to it at every opportunity. Only, among those greatest mystics, inclosed within
a declining religion, the marvelous story seemed to come from a dead world, it
had the odor of a withering flower and of the last breath of the incense. With
Fra Angelico, on the contrary, a fresh and chaste humanity was entering into it
gently. He was immersed to the shoulders in his century, but he saw hardly
anything of it, for his two eyes were turned away from its violent visions and
saw little else but flowering meadows, blond hair, embroidered robes, and the
heavens resplendent with stars; he heard scarcely anything of his century, for
he knew how to close his ears against its tumult in order to listen to the
harps and the pretty voices of the singers. It was a most delicate bride whose
hand he took to lead her to the new world. As she awaited the burning embrace
of the heroes who were approaching, it was from him that she recovered the
innocence so necessary to her. Italy had been struggling for two centuries to wash
her clean of the original sin. The purifiers of the world had been outraging
her for so long that at the hour when life overflowed in men's hearts, those
among them who were to recreate woman for the future turned to her with their
terrible adoration. For two thousand years she had been forgotten or
besmirched! They asked pardon of her with frenzied sobs, on their knees,
lifting their hands toward her and not daring to lift their eyes. All his life
Dante remained faithful to a dead woman. All his life Petrarch loved a living
woman whom he had no desire to possess. Giotto spoke of women with so much
tenderness that it is in the arms, in the hands, and in the bended knees of the
mothers and wives that he detected the parting of all the animate curves which
attached the forms to the center of the human drama. When the monk half opened
the door of his cloister to observe women as they passed, the crystal voice of
the Florentine bells entered with the breath of the roses, and both the monk
and the women were purified. Truly their love was an innocent one. They
wondered at everything, at themselves, at the things that were told them, at
the pink-and-white houses, at the terraced hills, and at the idea that there
could be tears and tragedies when nature was so delightful and when the miracle
proclaimed was so simple and so touching. The poets of the Middle Ages had
effaced from their hearts the memory of the ancient evils, and as both of them
were ignorant of love, they did not know that they were to suffer again. And
yet, only a few steps away from the Beato Angelico, life's experience was
beginning again. While in the light and the silence of which his pale harmonies
were, so to speak, the perfume, he was painting the lawns full of flowers and
the little virgins who always kept their hands crossed on their bosoms,
Masaccio was working, in a dark church, to cover an almost invisible wall with
the drama of conscience which defines in advance the activity of the critical
centuries opened by the Florentines.

To be
exact, Masaccio was not the first of his line. It was in Siena, the mystic
land, the focus of the most pronounced discord between the evolution of the
world and the traditions of faith, that the sculptor Jacopo della Quercia had
uttered the cry of alarm which Masaccio himself certainly heard. The work seems
of a singular maturity when one knows it to be the very first, before that of
Angelico, before that of Masaccio, before that of Donatello, and before that of
Masolino da Panicale, the painter who so disturbs us by the pictures he left in
Masaccio's chapel some years before the time of the latter artist. Jacopo's
work is about contemporaneous with the extraordinary effort of Ghiberti in
decorating the bronze doors of the Baptistery of Florence. It is even broader,
and were it not for its august ruggedness one would think that it had come a
hundred years after Angelico. Thanks to Giovanni Pisano, sculpture had taken a
great lead and could express its drama more forcibly than the painters who were
still encumbered with imagery and with Byzantinism, and who were incapable of
rising above school formulas and traditional prejudices, as Giotto had done.
One might think this work a powerful sketch for the tragedy of the Sistine and
the Tomb of the Medici. Whether Jacopo was decorating the fountain on the
Piazza del Municipio, whether he was carving on the façade of
San Petronio at Bologna the figure of Adam digging in the ground or Eve driven
from Paradise after the innocent and formidable drama of the first love, we already
get violent figures with frowning brows, heads borne by necks as a weapon is
borne by an arm, contracted and muscular hands clasping an indomitable child,
and the spirited movement of torsos and flanks and breasts created to shield
and to nourish all the joys and all the ills of the world—the cry of an angry
prophet. The highest human symbolism was uniting the soul with the form. The
eternal subject, the one that the Jewish poets wrested from the anecdote to
install it until the end of time in the very mechanism of our minds, the
unchanging story of man as he opens his eyes to life, as he wills to
interrogate life, as he is wounded by life and condemned to interrogate it more
deeply so as to dress that wound even while he inflicts others on himself—the eternal
subject blossomed from the stone. The spirit of the artist and the spirit of
the stone itself fused in the flash of the great lyric intuition through which
the motionless laws of universal harmony accord with the most ingenuous and the
most egoistic sentiment of our sorrows, of our cares, and of our daily work.
Jacopo della Quercia did not dream that the monotonous tragedy, which we are
led to accept as a cruel need when we question it continuously and deeply,
could cause silly tears to flow and draw forth moralizing protests against the
implacable destiny that we bear in our hearts from the day of our birth. Tie
accepted the human drama, and the human drama accepted brought him his
recompense. A terrible force dwelt in his sculptured stones, the profound
sentiment of primitive men expressed itself by the full form that the world
assumes in its periods of expansion, thus increasing its majesty tenfold. He
was already master of his great soul. His expressive surfaces sensed the long
silences; beside him Donatello seems contracted with pain and Michael Angelo
convulsed by fury and disgust. When he lays a dead person on the slab of a
funerary statue, he knows how to bring to the forehead the appearance of
positive peace, and the work takes on tragic grandeur because one feels that
passion has been arrested by the planes of the marble at every leap of the
heart and of the hand. And withal, he had already leaped over the gate of hell,
had left all hope behind. He outstripped his whole century to arrive, with a
single bound, at the conclusion of Michael Angelo, and no one understood him.

Masaccio,
on the contrary, immersed in a milieu more alive and more mobile, seizing hold,
from the first, of that tool, painting, by which Italian genius best expresses
itself, and dying, a mystery, at twenty-seven, was destined by his very
hesitations to act much more directly upon the mind of his time. That which he
defended, that which he venerated, that which he wanted to believe, all
attached him to the Middle Ages. But through the sensation and the disquietude
and the new faith that rose in him despite himself, he was already defining the
new century in its most grievous conflict. On the old wall of Santa Maria del
Carmine he had already painted Man and Woman driven forth by the angel from
Eden; but he took their hands to guide them, beyond their misfortune, to the
Paradise within their reach. He gave birth to the Renaissance, and it was
because he lived that it sought, by its earnest study of form, to renew the
lost rhythms of life.

He
invented painting. It was in the dark chapel decorated by Masaccio that
Raphael, da Vinci, Signorelli, and Michael Angelo came to seek their
initiation. As we are to-day, so they were seized by those crowds that are
reborn in the shadows, emerging slowly but irresistibly from their uniform
atmosphere, like great larvae of the renewed spirit and heart of men coming
forth from the confused energy of primitive matter. Masaccio, at the age of
twenty-five, knew what the greatest discovered only at the approach of old
age—that painting is the passage, the modeling sought for, the shadow that
turns around the forms, enveloping them with silence, uniting them with the
forms that are near them and behind them, and sculpturing the picture into its
receding planes, as a sculptor hollows out the marble to its depths. He had
discovered that what nature reveals to us is the continuity of its aspects. Not
more than five or six men, if as many after him, have possessed completely that
sense which has given them the power to imprint the unity and the movement of
life on the world issuing from their hearts. Florence understood him well, but
it was not able to follow him, and even da Vinci failed at the task.

This
conquest of unity by an intelligence marked the end of the Middle Ages. In
France, it had achieved its unity of instinct socially, each brain and each
hand bringing a stone to the edifice without knowing how and why the edifice
should be living. In Italy, Giotto had realized in himself the moral unity of his
race, but the world was not mature enough to allow him at the same time to take
possession of the plastic language wherein the shaded surfaces reach a
vanishing point in depth and whereby the individual is defined in his baffling
complexity. When Masaccio, in his "Baptism," saw those great bare
forms emerging from the crowd in which dramatic figures detach from the russet
shadow like denser masses in a fiery mist, he must have felt descending upon
his mind that sadness of the evenings to which the presentiment of the expected
daylight gives the added anguish of hope. A sublime soul ! It was not necessary
for him to express the imperishable tragedy of man exiled from happiness for
having willed to be man, of man reviled by God and cooling the burn of his remorse
in the water of absolution: it was within him that the imperishable tragedy
dwelt. When he indicated to the world that the living form which it
commissioned him to study would offer it a refuge, he closed its path to new
symbols until it should have learned to know nature again; he threw it back
upon analysis—that is to say, upon sadness.